Why the OLPC needs lots of usability work

November 23, 2006

This post is a collection of my concerns about the usability of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child, aka the “Hundred Dollar Laptop”) and how well suited it is to its target user groups. If you haven’t seen it, take a look at the video, or if you want to read more about the UI concept (named “Sugar”) from the horse’s mouth, read about it here.

Involvement of the users

Building a UI is like making a pair of shoes. Creativity is all well and good, but ultimately they have to fit the person you are making them for or they aren’t walking anywhere. While lots of hard work has gone into the UI design so far, it seems they are getting ahead of themselves and chasing their own dreams. The whole ‘breaking away from the desktop’ smacks heavily of academics who have finally found an outlet for their wacky ideas. Creativity is of course very important, but it has to be tempered within the requirements of the target audience. You gather requirements by speaking to the target audience, testing your designs on them and generally involving them in the design process. I wonder exactly how much of this is going on. The eToys application, for example, currently seems very raw and most appropriate for teaching programming to educated kids.

Transferability of skills.

The Sugar UI seems weird and back to front to us now, after a lifetime of traditional UIs. What will a traditional UI seem like to kids who grew up with the Sugar UI? Weirdly upside down? It reminds me of that psychology experiment you can do with prism glasses. These glasses make everything look upside down. Wear them for long enough and everything seems the right way up – until you take them off and then the world seems upside down without the glasses. You have trained your mind to look at everything in a upside down way. Is the OLPC Sugar UI like prism glasses?

What kind of foundation are we giving these kids when they eventually get faced with a ‘normal’ desktop?

Are the collaborative concepts half baked?

The community features of the OLPC seems to re-invent some of the tried and tested techniques we already have. Traditional list style presence indicators and discussion boards are very effective. The graffiti wall ‘do anything’ style discussion board offered on the OLPC has popped up manytimes in the past but never caught on. The concept is quite lovely but in practice the result is often very messy and anarchic. Structure helps, it doesn’t hinder.

One size doesn’t fit all

Maybe it’s just me but there seems to be some real vagueness about target audience. Who is it really for? And what are they actually going to use it for? The difference between an 8 year old and an 11 year old is huge. So is level of literacy. Computers aren’t a silver bullet to education. At best they can be considered a small but important lynchpin. Where in the bigger picture of educational policy will the OLPC fit? An old saying comes to mind: Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime. Well, give a man an OLPC and … what exactly?

Is the UI Patronising?

I can’t help thinking that the Sugar UI talks down to the users. It seems to be saying “You aren’t ever going to be able to cope with the computers we use in the west, so here, have this special one with cut down features!”

I’ve heard that users will also have access to the command line. I don’t see this as a solution, it’s almost like giving them a soldering iron and saying look – once they used the device fully for a few years and outgrow it, they can solder some new functionality onto the motherboard. Some middle ground is needed here.

22 comments

PB

November 26, 2006

HUH!?

There’s nothing wrong with that UI! These complaints sound like little more than a bunch of people upset that they aren’t part of one of the most important computer-related initatives to-date, if not the most important, and are simply urinating on the OLPC parade.

You have to look at this UI from the perspective of those children that will in-fact be using it, and in the different languages – people who have never seen Microsoft Windows and if they are lucky, will never have to.

“You arenâ€™t ever going to be able to cope with the computers we use in the west, so here, have this special one with cut down features!â€

I think that you took the OLPC idea from a different point of view. The OLPC is there to give low cost education and information, with some “bonus” coming from the use of a computer platform.

Don’t you think that a book is ok both for a 8 years old boy and for a 11 years old boy? Sure, it is. It’s good from the beginning to our deaths.
The OLPC is the same: bring information. Since it access *any* kind of data format – it’s a computer – the information could be displayed both from a illustrated book for youngers and from a high-density book for older students.

So, give a boy a OLPC and you are feeding him for life (well… ok…). :)

Also, aven if I agree that it could be tested before shipping (and I think they did… no?) for an optimal UI design, I don’t think that using Gnome, KDE or any other already-existing tool will help.
“What kind of foundation are we giving these kids when they eventually get faced with a â€˜normalâ€™ desktop?”
The answer is simple: we’re giving them something, but not everything. That isn’t a computer and doesn’t want to educate completely on how to use a computer. It’s a TOOL to LEARN, and nothing more.

It’s like saying that the UI of your mobile phone is wrong just because it doesn’t educate on how to use a PC. You’ll see that even if the UI of a mobile could be bad, really bad, the reason under this isn’t that it doesn’t use Gnome or KDE… :)

Robert Gillham

November 26, 2006

I’m afraid accusing the author of sour grapes sounds like little more than childish abuse and misses the point utterly. Harry is clearly not advocating installing Microsoft Windows on all the OLPC laptops, merely that the OS conforms to established convention for graphical user interfaces. Microsoft merely utilise conventions established by Xerox in the 1970s, and refined since by the likes of Apple, who equally conform to these conventions, as do the GUIs developed for Linux such as Windows X.

Surely the point is that children deserve the opportunity to learn skills which allow them to compete in a global economy. They need to be able to stand up equal to those who have learnt their IT skills in the ‘developed’ world. The third world doesn’t need our cast-offs, hand me downs or knock off, simplified products that prevent them from ever gaining any kind of level pegging.

Kids are not senile computer illiterates, sure it might seem wierd for a while but they will learn fast… it’s about using computers… not some specific UI.. plus.. what’s wrong with a new standard UI.. there will be modifications.. so I don’t think there is much to worry about this…

* The author implies that today’s desktop OS’ will not change in the future (the shift of focus from hiearcic disk structure to search comes to mind)
* The author implies that the fundamental concepts behind today’s desktop OS’ are optimal, and shouldn’t be challenged. There are lots of UX researchers that would disagree (for example the late Jef Raskin).
* The author implies that people (children or adults alike) takes harm of being exposed to different UIs. I can’t say that I agree. Western kids are exposed to all kinds of UIs all the time (game consoles, cellphones, computers, etc.) – why should OLPC users be any less capable of climbing those learning curves?
* More and more work happens inside the web browser. I don’t know if that will be the case for OLPC children, but it’s not that far fetched, isn’t it? And as a kind of web browsing device, the OLPC laptop looks great, with a interface that gets out of the way.

Geir – I think the web browser was the first design choice that bothered me. The decision to hide the address bar is a decision to take away an important part of the UI. Even if it is accessible by some other means not having the URL visible to the user robs them of one of the universal features of the web and prevents them observing and learning from the structure of the URL or even getting used to passing around URLs verbally or in writing.

I’m afraid there were a couple of innacuracies in my video. Firstly, The web browser is not firefox – apparently it is “Dillo”. Secondly, the title bar doubles up as the address bar. Sorry about that!

Geir:
I agree with pretty much everything you say. I didn’t mean to imply that the current desktop model (a la xp, osx, kde etc) is the panacea of UI design. I just have some reservations about Sugar in its current implementation. It needs user testing, and lots of it. This way, if there are any problems with the UI they can be ironed out and the OLPC can completely fulfil its (amazing) potential.

Harry is missing the point with Sugar.
It merely acts as an application launcher.

The User Interface itself is not the important part of the system. The applications themselves (or ‘Activities’) are the ‘tools’ for education.
Sugar allows users to ‘network’ by making the user part of a group or neighbourhood.

The applications in the latest distribution are cut down versions of products available as open source. Certainly they have been tailored to work within the hardware requirements of the OLPC. Any laptop that could work for four days continuously on a full charge is worth cut down versions of software. I would think that the current distribution is not the last. Lets see how far the ongoing development goes before shooting the dev team ;)

Daniel

November 27, 2006

Wow! The “Toys” system is Squeak Smalltalk! I mean, yeah, you’re starting off with the Etoys, but the source is available and fully inspectable, and it’s really really neat under the hood. When writing Java or many other languages, I wish I had the power of the Smalltalk debugger.

I don’t think the User Interface is just an “application launcher”. Have a look at my latest post about the integration of collaborative tools into the desktop. It is very adventurous, revolutionary even, but I do worry a possible lack of user testing. I wonder if you can turn the WiFi off to conserve battery power even further? I guess it’s against the concept of the Mesh network.

Bert Freudenberg

November 28, 2006

If you judge the etoys activity by your emulation video, you miss most of it. It is designed to run at the laptop’s 1200×900 resolution. You at least need to run the emulation at 1024×768, but it defaults to 640×480.

At a proper resolution, you would see the introductory demonstration, and a dozen or so example projects that show quite well that this is *not* for learning programming but much more.

Alan Kay skrev:
> Maybe we should at least tell the guy who made the video ???
>
> He probably couldn’t even see the exit button from the continuous
> demos ….
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan
>
> ————-
>
> At 05:27 AM 11/25/2006, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> On Nov 25, 2006, at 11:54 , karl wrote:
>>
>>> I saw on Slashdot a link to a video of the UI of the OPLC:
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwzCsOFxT-U&mode=related&search=
>>>
>>> It was painful to watch the Squeak part of that video. I shows so
>>> many of the common mistakes
>>> people make with Squeak. And it shows a lot of quirks in Squeak
>>> and etoys. Should the event playback be modal so the user input
>>> will not disrupt the playback. What are do other people think ?
>>
>> The problem is that the emulation images are not set up to run at the
>> original resolution, but at 640×480. One has to fix them before
>> running, but that is too cumbersome for most people:
>>
>>
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation#Image_Configuration
>>
>> I filed a bug to correct this:
>>
>> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/504
>>
>> But maybe we need to lobby someone to get it fixed ASAP.
Granted, but there are a few issues that are Squeak specific:

He pulls a game out of the Object tool but he drops it within the bounds
of the Object tool and the game disappears! Quite confusing.

He tries to get the game again, and the game gets embedded in a project
within a project, and the game gets cropped off. Also quite confusing to
a new user. (The same will happen to Script tiles when you have a
PasteUpMorph on the desktop.)

Event playback is not modal, so you can change stuff while the playback
is playing, like close the paint palette. This is confusing. Maybe event
playback could happen within a ‘playback morph’ with ‘video player
buttons’ to control the playback ?

The demos were constructed in a book morph — the demo’er is getting
stuck by the bounds of the page… I think this is where most
problems are stemming from.
– Kim

At 6:56 PM +0100 11/25/06, karl wrote:
>Alan Kay skrev:
>>Maybe we should at least tell the guy who made the video ???
>>
>>He probably couldn’t even see the exit button from the continuous demos ….
>>
>>Cheers,
>>
>>Alan
>>
>>————-
>>
>>At 05:27 AM 11/25/2006, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>>On Nov 25, 2006, at 11:54 , karl wrote:
>>>
>>>>I saw on Slashdot a link to a video of the UI of the OPLC:
>>>>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwzCsOFxT-U&mode=related&search=
>>>>
>>>>It was painful to watch the Squeak part of that video. I shows so
>>>>many of the common mistakes
>>>>people make with Squeak. And it shows a lot of quirks in Squeak
>>>>and etoys. Should the event playback be modal so the user input
>>>>will not disrupt the playback. What are do other people think ?
>>>
>>>The problem is that the emulation images are not set up to run at the
>>>original resolution, but at 640×480. One has to fix them before
>>>running, but that is too cumbersome for most people:
>>>
>>>
>>>http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation#Image_Configuration
>>>
>>>I filed a bug to correct this:
>>>
>>> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/504
>>>
>>>But maybe we need to lobby someone to get it fixed ASAP.
>Granted, but there are a few issues that are Squeak specific:
>
>He pulls a game out of the Object tool but he drops it within the
>bounds of the Object tool and the game disappears! Quite confusing.
>
>He tries to get the game again, and the game gets embedded in a
>project within a project, and the game gets cropped off. Also quite
>confusing to a new user. (The same will happen to Script tiles when
>you have a PasteUpMorph on the desktop.)
>
>Event playback is not modal, so you can change stuff while the
>playback is playing, like close the paint palette. This is
>confusing. Maybe event playback could happen within a ‘playback
>morph’ with ‘video player buttons’ to control the playback ?
>
>Karl
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Etoys mailing list
>Etoys@laptop.org
>http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys

Yes, it’s possible that we want to only let the end-user choose the
“stop demo” button while event playback is running, and then take the
EU to the project with choices.

Cheers,

Alan

————

At 09:56 AM 11/25/2006, karl wrote:
>Alan Kay skrev:
>>Maybe we should at least tell the guy who made the video ???
>>
>>He probably couldn’t even see the exit button from the continuous demos ….
>>
>>Cheers,
>>
>>Alan
>>
>>————-
>>
>>At 05:27 AM 11/25/2006, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>>On Nov 25, 2006, at 11:54 , karl wrote:
>>>
>>>>I saw on Slashdot a link to a video of the UI of the OPLC:
>>>>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwzCsOFxT-U&mode=related&search=
>>>>
>>>>It was painful to watch the Squeak part of that video. I shows so
>>>>many of the common mistakes
>>>>people make with Squeak. And it shows a lot of quirks in Squeak
>>>>and etoys. Should the event playback be modal so the user input
>>>>will not disrupt the playback. What are do other people think ?
>>>
>>>The problem is that the emulation images are not set up to run at the
>>>original resolution, but at 640×480. One has to fix them before
>>>running, but that is too cumbersome for most people:
>>>
>>>
>>>http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation#Image_Configuration
>>>
>>>I filed a bug to correct this:
>>>
>>> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/504
>>>
>>>But maybe we need to lobby someone to get it fixed ASAP.
>Granted, but there are a few issues that are Squeak specific:
>
>He pulls a game out of the Object tool but he drops it within the
>bounds of the Object tool and the game disappears! Quite confusing.
>
>He tries to get the game again, and the game gets embedded in a
>project within a project, and the game gets cropped off. Also quite
>confusing to a new user. (The same will happen to Script tiles when
>you have a PasteUpMorph on the desktop.)
>
>Event playback is not modal, so you can change stuff while the
>playback is playing, like close the paint palette. This is
>confusing. Maybe event playback could happen within a ‘playback
>morph’ with ‘video player buttons’ to control the playback ?
>
>Karl

A fair review, I think. Although I don’t think the UI is patronizing. The desktop metaphor worked for adults, because adults had worked in an office envronment. Children do not, so a different metaphor was needed. That being said, I prefer the UI from Apple’s eMate, the predecessor of the XO. Read up on it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate

David DuBois

January 2, 2007

Hi, first of all, I’m a first time visitor to this site and I came across it when I was trying to find out what this OLPC thing is all about.

I just think that this OS is on the wrong path. I believe a better path to educating children via computer would be to have a computer with (the admittedly present) USB 2.0 port(s) and allow that to be the main source of programs beyond a web browser. Then, have certain shortcuts to certain cites on the hard drive that I guess is actually a flash drive so that the kids can click and be on google, click and go to a web based word proccessor, click and go to you tube, etc. Basically, the web can do all the simple required functions of a computer and we should be spending our energy perfecting and promoting these instead of putting crippled odd applications on their computers.

And I agree, if you grow up using something other than a traditional PC/mac, they will be extrodinarily difficult to understand when you, say, get an education and go to a respected university to continue your education and they assume you can use a PC. We aren’t doing them a huge favor by dumbing down and turning around our computers.

I agree with Harry’s questions completely. I have one rhetorical question: Do the designers of OLPC really refer to the kids who are the intended users of this computer as “end users” instead of just saying “kids”?

Bunter

August 17, 2007

I agree this UI seems to treat it’s users as complete idiots. If the device is meant for giving just low cost education, why not throw some standard linux window manager on it at let the kids (who are much smarter than the people behind OLPC project seem to think) deal with rest. But no, it has to be turned into academic pet project dragging for years and years and hardly reaching anywhere.